Business Marketing

Almost every business on the planet sets out with the main objective of earning money. This is usually done by manufacturing some form of product, or offering a service, and then charging people money for it.

Firstly, it is a very rare case where a business can offer a product or service that is truly unique and cannot be provided by anyone else. This means that your business will be competing with other businesses that sell a similar item and you will both be trying to make money from the same customers, who only want to spend their money once.

Marketing is the main tool used by modern firms to draw potential customers to do business with them and not with their rivals. It is a very extensive topic that is influenced by a great number of internal and external factors, but when done right it can be the one business practise that could make or break a corporation. Any time spent on marketing will reap benefits, although spending this time correctly can yield extraordinary results.

So where should you start when constructing a marketing strategy for your own company? Well, each situation is different, and every company will have its own set of advantages and weak points that must be taken into consideration, but there is a marketing principle that can be applied to almost any corporation to be used as a marketing platform.

The Marketing Mix

The marketing mix was a phrase that was first coined during the 1950’s and is an expression that is used to describe the fundamental building blocks of any marketing strategy. It reflects the fact that marketing is not a straightforward, blunt-edged business tool, but rather a subtle balance of different elements of business operations. It got its name since it is similar to the ingredients list for a recipe.

The term was later built upon to include the concept of “four P’s” that described the essential elements of the marketing mix. The formalisation of these P’s made it very clear for business managers and marketers to swiftly associate the elements of marketing to the strengths of their own companies, and by doing so could very rapidly create a tailored and effective marketing strategy.

The “product” aspect of the four P’s can pertain to any service, like bad back treatment Ruddington, or even any intangible asset being offered for sale by a business.

Product

Whilst every aspect of the marketing mix is a requirement, the “product” element mentioned as one of the four P’s is perhaps the most crucial of all. It describes the physical product or intangible service that your company will be offering, and at the end of the day it is the reason that buyers are going to spend money with you.

Many people don’t think that marketing has any place to play when it comes to the actual product that your company is selling. In fact, the common train of thought very often bears the precise opposite sentiment. Surely it should be the opposite way around – your manufacturing department creates a product for sale and then it is the task of the marketing department to find ways to sell it, right?

Take the computer software market as an example. There are many well-known brands of both operating system and software application products on the marketplace already, and since the market is fairly well saturated it would be very tough (and expensive) to “take on the big boys”.

Rather than developing an operating system and then trying to craft a marketing strategy to take on the likes of Microsoft and Apple, it would be far more effective to look at what types of product are desired in the current marketplace, and how feasible it would be to produce and sell them. By being aware of the marketing mix early on in your product development cycle you can avoid business dead-ends at a later time.

Once your goods have been fashioned and created it is still a vital skill to be able to objectively review your own products to recognise the reasons why a customer should buy your product rather than a competitors’.

A different form of this part of the marketing mix is called product variation and is typically used to either extend the lifecycle of a product currently in the market, or to make your new product attractive to as many customers as possible.

The motor industry uses this technique very effectively by offering various engines, trim packages and interior options with the cars that they sell. They use the marketing mix to good effect to sell their own goods in an incredibly competitive marketplace.

As part of our individual promotion plan, our BBQ Rotisserie business very carefully studied what made our products stand out from the masses.

Price

Another key factor in the marketing mix concerns the price of your products or services. This isn’t a simple case of performing market research to determine the top price that your customers would pay (although that can be a useful tool to use), but rather making use of the price of your products as a strategic tool designed to achieve any specific goals your business has. The potential advantages of an effective pricing plan are surprisingly large!

Whilst it may seem obvious, it’s still worth pointing out that price has always been, and probably always will be, one of the crucial factors that customers take into account when they are making a purchase. It is also worth noting that customers don’t always consider the cheapest price to be the best price.

There are many questions that you need to ask yourself while devising a good pricing plan, key among which are the price sensitivity of your customers, what your competitors are doing and how can pricing maximise your own profits. From a strategy point of view though, pricing can be covered by two primary principals; price skimming and also penetration pricing.

Price skimming

The principal idea behind price skimming is to make as much cash as possible from the segment of the market which is price-insensitive and are going to be prepared to spend a large amount of money to get a product or service early on.

This pricing strategy is frequently used in the consumer electronics market where customers will often eagerly await the release of a new mobile phone or computer games console. Manufacturers could set almost any price they wanted to and there would still be a loyal core of customers that would pay it. By making use of this method as part of a pre-ordering strategy, a firm can help to smooth its own cash flow.

Penetration pricing

Penetration pricing is at the other end of the pricing spectrum, and is tailored towards gaining a large market share at a short-term cost so that monetary rewards can be made long into the future. It can be a risky strategy, but when used correctly it can create revenue streams for many years to come. When establishing a price for penetration it is still important to not give a bad impression of your product by aiming for too low a number.

Another thing to keep in mind is that “price” is the only part of the marketing mix that will generate income for a business. The other members of the four P’s will all cost money to create or carry out. So it is even more vital to get your pricing technique right.

Following using on-line tools to compare key word lookup popularity we chose list of the best songs to steer our strategy for online promotion as well as off-line advertising materials.

Place

Place is the component of the marketing mix that is often not addressed by companies, but it’s still an important part of selling your product successfully. In short, it describes the way in which you provide your product to your consumer, and consequently how you collect money from them.

The most typical ramifications of place-based marketing are the physical locations in which your goods are sold. For the majority of consumer products, this includes the distribution infrastructure between your production centres and retailers and other outlets around the world. Since distribution of a physical product costs money it is important to determine your own priorities and alter your distribution network accordingly. This is the primary use of this element of the marketing mix.

With the growing use of the Internet by your potential customers, marketing strategies have had to consider how they use the Internet to help deliver their products. By using the Internet as a point of contact (or even as a whole distribution channel in download-based markets such as MP3s) firms are now able to reach out to a huge pool of potential customers.

Promotion

When you say the word “marketing”, most people immediately think of the promotional aspect of the marketing mix, although as we have seen, this is only one branch of a more comprehensive system. Promotion can be employed on a very individual basis or as a mass communication instrument, and whilst it might be a costly undertaking it is often an essential one.

Advertising is one of the most typical forms of promotion. Classically it would be done by posting on billboards, producing short clips for TV and radio or by physically distributing flyers or leaflets to potential buyers. With the arrival of the information age we have witnessed a great increase in promotion via e-mail and the Internet, or just as targeted advertising materials posted through your front door. The potential for individualised advertising has never been so great.

Another significant part of promotion involves branding, which will not necessarily yield more product sales directly, but goes back to one of the preliminary purposes of marketing; getting customers to choose your product over those of your rivals.

Putting it into Practise

As previously mentioned each business is unique and will have different marketing requirements. By using a balance of the four P’s discussed above you can take a good view of your own marketing plan.

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